Poverty in America: Urban and Rural Inequality and Deprivation in the 21st Century

Poverty in America too often goes unnoticed, and disregarded. This perhaps results from America’s general level of prosperity along with a fairly widespread notion that conditions inevitably are better in the USA than elsewhere. Political rhetoric frequently enforces such an erroneous notion: “the poor live better in America than the middle class elsewhere,” “America has the best health care in the world,” “income inequality is a sign of ‘freedom’,” and the like. With American poverty increasing, social mobility decreasing, and income inequality growing it has become urgent that our society direct its attention to poverty as one of the country’s most troublesome issues. Poverty and Public Policy helps to focus that attention worldwide; this book, Poverty in America will help to emphasize the issue in this country.

Max J. Skidmore (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he is University of Missouri Curators’ Professor of Political Science, and Thomas Jefferson Fellow. He has been Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in India, where he was Director of the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, and has been Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Hong Kong. He has published over two dozen works on numerous topics, including Social Security and its Enemies (1999), Securing America’s Future: A Bold Plan to Preserve and Expand Social Security (2008), Bulwarks Against Poverty: Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act (2014), and Presidents, Pandemics, and Politics (forthcoming, 2016).